Was down near Paddock Wood on business today and though... Hmm... I wonder if Ian King is in and if he has any of those nice William Optics 66mm scopes? So I gave him a ring - "Oh yes, I've got one in stock", he said. "Great", I said, "Be there in 10 mins!".
So now i'm the proud owner of a lovely William Optics WS 66 SD APO.
The engineering on it is fantastic. it has a retractable dew shield and both the focuser unit and the eyepiece unit can be rotated and locked in place which will be very useful for imaging and getting the angle just right.
All I need now is some clear skies *sigh*
(http://www.amateur-astronomy.org/images/WOWS66SDAPO.jpg)
So you went for the blue one .... very nice at least we can't get them mixed up at the next DSC (mine's black)... I have to agree the engineering is very good in such a reasonably priced scope & the focuser (10:1) is a real joy to use...
I look forward to your review/ images which I guess will be at 2 weeks due to the cloud cover you have just guaranteed by buying a new scope...
Cheers, John
Well the forecast for tomorrow and Thursday is looking promising. I hope to at least grab some images of something brightish that can be done quickly for test shots. The images you have done with yours so far John are great.
Watch this space!
Mike, tonight should be perfect, although you will have to stay up late.
Also a top tip here, put the camera at the back of the scope then it will work properly :-)
Did you get a T-Ring or a field flattener for it?
John & Mike, these scopes have little mounting plates at the bottom, if you bolt them together you will have a nifty pair of bino's.
Also I did some retail theropy yesterday and bought a Hersshel Wedge by Baader, these are not cheap & the K-Line filter will also be arriving soon, I'm too old to stay up late in the summer :-(
Yeah tonight looks promising. I will just have to "work from home tomorrow" ;)
No I didn't get a field flattener for it. Will test it out to see if it's needed first. What would i use the T-Ring for? I have an adaptor to attach the Nikon if that's what you mean?
Ian said that it works great with a focal reducer to get mega wide fields. Attached to the Nikon D70 it gives a magnification equal to my 300mm zoom lens. Will be interesting to see what I get with the SXV-H9.
Mike - acording to my calculations with my Eos300D I get 130 X 200 arcmins (D70 will be very similar) - The SXV-H9 has a chip size of 6.7 X 9mm which will give a FOV with the ZS66 of approx 60 X 80 arc mins..
Cheers, John
Yeah I ran the stats through the Starry Night FOV indicator and it is about a 33% increase over the ED80. Anyway, it's looking clear outside so i'm going out to set up.
Nice toy, want to see images :-)